Fleeing Russia during the Cold War

 

   

In Mayday, Ryan Reynolds plays a Navy pilot shot down while flying a spy mission at the height of the Cold War. In Russia, Reynolds’ Troy is saved by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB agent living as a backwood recluse in the Russian wilds. Ustinov regrets his KGB past, obsessively watches Top Gun, and wouldn’t mind moving to the US. After an opening full of swaggering top-gun bravado, the movie begins to temper its view of US-Soviet relations, adding a bit of nuance. All-American Troy seems shocked to learn that ordinary Russians are capable of kindness (big reveal, no?). Mayday quickly moves into hybrid territory: part action movie, part buddy comedy, and part road movie as Troy and Ustinov try to escape the Soviet Union. A KGB official (Marvin Dorocinski) doggedly follows in close pursuit, but  Nikolai is no pushover. His KGB fighting chops haven't entirely eroded. Maria Bakalova signs on as Nikolai's  daughter, and David Morse has a small role as Troy’s ailing father. Writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) give Mayday the kind of big-budget look we expect from such thrillers. Still, the mix of humor and action doesn’t quite click, and Troy’s penchant for wise-cracking hardly budges the needle on the wit meter. The story picks up for a big finish, having set itself apart by leaning on what looks like novelty casting. Branagh doesn’t seem the most likely choice for kick-ass action, but there he is, trying to inject a touch of Russian melancholy into Ustinov's dialogue. In sum: I won’t give this one a resounding “Nyet,” but I can’t give it an unqualified  “Dah!” either.

‘Cabrini:’ an ode to determination

 

    I always feel a bit awkward reviewing movies about religious figures. Such movies can trigger a series of false assumptions on the part of readers.

   If a reviewer praises the movie, he or she can be seen as endorsing a particular set of spiritual assertions. Criticism, on the other hand, easily can be confused with rejection of someone's beliefs. 

   Moreover, the sincerity that marks most "religious" movies doesn't always equate with artistic success.

   Cabrini, a bio-pic about Frances Xavier Cabrini, occupies a middle ground, locating itself somewhere between inspirational fare and hardscrabble realism while trying to liberate itself from parochial constrictions.

   I don't know if Mother Cabrini, as she was widely known, viewed herself as a prototypical feminist  but the movie tends to treat her as one, an ambitious and determined woman battling long odds to achieve her vision. 

   Frances Xavier Cabrini arrived in the US in 1889 determined to care for New York's poor Sicilian immigrants while also aiming to expand her work into a global network of orphanages and hospitals. 

  Cristiana Dell'Anna plays the lead role, painting a portrait of a dedicated woman who challenges male authority: first the Pope (Giancarlo Giannini), and later a New York archbishop (David Morse) and the mayor of New York City (John Lithgow).

   Note: I used the word “woman” and not the word “nun.” That tells you something about the movie’s generalized approach.

   Director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde plops Mother Cabrini and her nuns into the squalor of New York's Five Points, a lower-east side neighborhood. 

  Driven by respiratory problems, Cabrini knew her body eventually would betray her. In the film, she works as if every day might be her last. 

  In New York, Cabrini takes orphans off the streets and provides refuge for a Five Points prostitute (Romana Maggiora Vergano) who's being brutalized by her pimp. 

    The dialogue sometimes has the ring of a rudimentary civics lesson. At one point, Cabrini talks about defending immigrants of all ethnicities; they're the future of America, etc.

  Aside from WASP prejudice, little mention is made of the social conditions that forced so many Italian immigrants into abject poverty.

   As an outsider, it struck me that the movie downplayed the spiritual/religious aspects of Cabrini's Catholicism, as well as the role religion played in the lives of the populations Cabrini served en route to becoming a saint in 1946, some 29 years after her death.

   It would be an exaggeration to think of Cabrini as a movie about a nun who becomes a feminist superhero, but you get the idea and, in this case, the moral of the story seems reducible to a bromide: Miracles are made by determination, hard work, and to use a decidedly non-Catholic word, chutzpah.

  

A zombie tsunami hits screens

It may not be a zombie classic, but the action-heavy World War Z contains trace elements of smarts.

When the zombies in World War Z twitch and convulse, they look like the kind of awkward geeks who lack either the common sense or decency to stay off dance floors. But unlike the hopelessly arrhythmic or even the creatures in most low-grade zombie movies, these big-bite men and women have gone global: They arrive on screen in swarming hordes, the undead residents of Earth terrorizing the planet in apparently endless waves.

As you may already know from the movie's trailers, World War Z imagines a world in which zombies have become a dangerous infestation, a population explosion of monsters eager to consume those who remain fully human. Think locusts with two legs.

Downplaying the political slant of the Max Brooks novel on which it's based, World War Z emphasizes biological mayhem a la Steven Soderbergh's Contagion . Director Marc Forster's gargantuan mixture of sci-fi and horror tells us that the zombie condition stems from an unexplained virus.

Skeptical viewers may be tempted to think that the movie spreads a virus of its own by indulging in the kind of frenzied, non-stop action that infects the nation's multiplexes during the summer months.

In the case of War War Z, this may not be an entirely bad thing. The movie explores what might happen if an unsuspecting and unprepared populace faced a fast-moving catastrophe. All bets suddenly are off.

The movie -- which stars Brad Pitt -- dishes out agitated bursts of excitement and manages a reasonably neat trick: It makes an entirely preposterous story appear as if possesses a reasonable amount of intelligence.

Pitt portrays Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator who -- almost from the movie's start -- finds himself on the run from zombies along with his wife (Mirelle Enos) and two daughters. Early scenes in a Philadelphia traffic jam serve up an effectively deadly combination: gridlock and chaos.

Forster gained action experience on Quantum of Solace, after directing movies such as Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball. With World War Z, he takes a globe-hopping approach to a story in which Gerry's former boss (Fana Mokoena) secures the safety of our hero's family by airlifting them off the roof of a Newark tenement to the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Security comes at a price. Gerry's family only can remain on the carrier if he agrees to lead a mission aimed at determining the cause of the zombie-producing virus, thereby enabling scientists to develop a vaccine that will prevent its continued spread.

The movie takes Gerry from early scenes in Philadelphia and Newark to South Korea, Jerusalem and Cardiff, Wales, where the story settles at a laboratory run by the World Health Organization.

Forster does a decent, if not inspired, job with the action, keeping the pacing brisk and not allowing a great deal of time for thought. His greatest achievement involves shots of the zombie masses trying to breach the walls the Israelis have erected around Jerusalem. Evidently, the Israelis were the only people to take the zombie threat seriously from the outset.

There's no show-boating in Pitt's performance, which doesn't need to get much beyond genre efficiency. The supporting cast includes a nice turn from David Morse as a rogue CIA agent. Danielle Kertesz is equally good as an Israeli soldier who joins forces with Gerry as he hopscotches the globe in search of answers.

For the most part, though, World War Z moves so quickly that the performances hardly matter. The movie is at once streamlined and abundant: It serves up more action than plot while depicting a world engulfed by mega-helpings of zombie rot.

Forster also does a nice job whipping up suspense, particularly in the final going when the movie dishes out a more intimate brand of tension. He also serves the blockbuster beast by including at least one buzz-generating bit of action: You've heard of snakes on a plane, try zombies on a plane and you've got the idea.

World War Z leaves us wondering what happened to a couple of characters who disappear without explanation; it also lacks the kind of depth and emotional resonance that would have made it more than a souped-up "B" movie.

But as summer movies go, you could do a lot worse, and probably already have.